Friday, April 22, 2011

LIFE-TRANSFORMING THINGS I LEARNED FROM MEN-Part 8

This is the 8th in a series of posts on this topic, started on April 15. You can scroll down to see the first 7 parts. This is about the 4th of 4 men I dated after my divorce who taught me valuable lessons...

4. Matt: My next teacher in the post-divorce dating world was a man named Matt—a fellow Libra who was a couple years younger and similar to me in his health-mindedness and extroversion. He also shared several of my interests and had a great sense of humor. We got along fine for a while, but after a few weeks, I noticed that he wasn’t usually willing to drive the 40 minutes to my house—or even meet me halfway—for our dates. He often expected me to shuffle my hectic schedule with my two kids and drive to his house at his convenience. The clincher came when he got terribly drunk at a formal affair he took me to and expected me to drive him home and take care of him after he got sick in the bathtub of his apartment.

Finally, after feeling taken advantage of for 5 weeks, I said “You don’t respect me at all!” to which he replied “That’s because you don’t respect yourself.” At first, I was angry and hurt. How dare he!

But, after calming down and thinking about it, I realized he was right. I didn’t respect myself if I constantly let him take advantage of me and if I kept kowtowing to please him rather than standing up for myself and setting healthy boundaries related to my schedule and my children. Though what Matt said felt like a slap in the face at the time, in hindsight I saw it as the wake-up call I needed to help me finally, once and for all, change my behavior so I could ask for and get what I wanted and deserved in a relationship. This is a lesson that ultimately helped me fortify my self-respect and self-esteem in a big way...and made future relationships and life in general much easier and more fulfilling.

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